We’re only gifted with so many hours of life here on earth, so why would anyone waste them listening to the same lengthy keynote twice in one month? That was the thought that raced through my mind when Synopsys’ Aart de Geus stepped up onto the stage in front of 500+ SNUG attendees at the Santa Clara Convention Center yesterday morning and clicked on his title foil.

“Shift Left,” it said.

“Oh no,” I said. For pity’s sake, this was the exact same talk co-CEO de Geus offered up less than three weeks ago on March 3rd at DVCon in San Jose. I looked around for the nearest exit.

Then, cooler heads prevailed. Mine.

Wait a minute, I said. Three weeks ago I sat in the back of a ballroom at the DoubleTree, listening over the heads of 350 people at DVCon, and typed everything the good doctor said into my tablet, verbatim. I’ve already done the heavy lifting here, I thought. I’ve got his script on my tablet, I’ve seen the slides, and I’ve heard the jokes.

Does Synopsys believe an entirely different audience attends DVCon than that which attends SNUG? Why else would they present the exact same talk at the two venues? Perhaps no one at SNUG actually does verification? Why not compare the SNUG talk to the one at DVCon?

So, with that much entertainment guaranteed I sat back and enjoyed the show.

******************Highlights that showed up in both keynotes …

* Shifting left is not a political imperative directed at an otherwise right-leaning audience. It’s an observation that as things move to the left along the X-axis, which is Time, they move up along the Y-axis, which is Uncertainty. This means that the more quickly you do things, the less certainty you have with regards to the outcome.

A whimsical sentiment within the context of a content-lite keynote, but not so whimsical when applied to EDA tools which purport to do things faster, faster, ever faster. Nobody who sells faster-than-yesterday’s EDA tools wants you to believe that faster iterations comes at the expense of accuracy, least of all Synopsys.

* Nonetheless, when it comes to ICs, it’s just one long, old, old story, told over and over again. Whether you’re talking about design, IP, verification, or software, it’s always about moving to the left on the X-axis and up on the Y-axis. Always.

* The argument for design reuse [read, “using IP”] is built on a tower of well-fitted Legos. Audiences at both DVCon and SNUG apparently struggle with the concept of shrink-wrapped IP, so they need the Legos analogy to illustrate it all. The Synopsys co-CEO asked that the IC guys respect the materials science and engineering at the core of Legos’ success, the fine tolerances and mastery of fabrication that allows plastic parts to fit together securely each and every time.

This admiration for Legos, so carefully expressed at both DVCon and SNUG, prompted a bit of reflection: If these audiences were made up of Legos developers would a keynoter invoke the fine tolerances and elegant engineering required to integrate silicon IP onto a chip to explain the subtleties of producing and using Legos? Just asking …

* The 1977 Oldsmobile Toronado was historic for what reason? Answer: It could brag on the first on-board MCU. Now today, almost 40 years later, there’s the equivalent of a 12-wafer’s worth of ICs under the hood.

* Verification is important, and VIP is really important. So is UPF, writing testbenches, and static/formal, etc. Meanwhile, stop the silos, stop the madness, combine the debug databases, and unify the compilation. After all, debug’s not a tool; it’s an architecture!

* We may be lingering on the 28-nanometer bridge en route to the future, but continue to put your faith in finFETs as you march from 16 to 14 to 10 to 5. ‘Nuff said.

* The design and verification chain for ICs today is like a well-oiled machine. Lots of gears of various sizes all turning merrily across the page, a veritable “Swiss watch” of inter-connectivity. Given that pictures are worth a thousand words, check out this foil from the set used to illustrate both of the March keynotes. Note, however, that in real [keynote] time all gears are spinning around in a madcap array of coordinated choreography.

* And let’s not forget sloppy software developers. They should take a page from the Discipline Handbook that drives hardware developers and clean up their act! Patches? Really? Hardware developers don’t have that luxury, so neither should software guys.

Software developers need to learn how to spell Six Sigma (or is it 6Sigma?) They need to learn that “disciplined sign-off drives predictable execution. Software integrity must match hardware integrity, and software developers must learn that kind of discipline!”

* The IoT is like that many Angry Birds mucking up the works of development and implementation. And the IoT needs so much: Low power. Portability. Sensors. Security. Arggg.

* In industries as diverse as biology, automotive, wearables for health, energy and oil exploration, technology is the enabler. Yes, economics is important, but if the impact of technology in these areas lives up to its promise, investment monies will always be available. The kind of progress for mankind that’s destined to come of all of this, will outpace anything ever seen before in the history of history. Ever.

******************Tips from DVCon that [possibly] tweaked the keynote at SNUG …

* Synopsys is the proud owner of about 400 million lines of code. That’s more than in the mouse genome, but less than in the human, thank goodness. This whimsy offered up at both DVCon and SNUG got a bigger laugh at the latter because the keynote on the 23rd was just after breakfast, whereas the keynote on the 3rd was just after lunch.

* When the talk at SNUG got around to bragging about how seamlessly VCS (acquired from Chronologic), HAPS (acquired from Hardi via Synplicity), ZeBu (acquired from EVE), and Verdi (acquired from Springsoft) all work together, it was clear that the company believes this stuff really matters to the audience at SNUG. SNUG guys need their verification tools to be user-friendly, well-integrated, and able to easily walk in lockstep into that magical land of First Time Success. Even if they weren’t at DVCon.

* And they need apps. Hundreds and hundreds of apps, which users are developing in a kinda/sorta open sorta way, which Synopsys is keeping an eye on, because it’s “always useful to share.” This might have been mentioned at DVCon, but with markedly less proprietary angst.

* When you show the slide of the ’77 Toronado at DVCon and ask rhetorically what was new and innovative there, your audience is full of real engineers and they shout out stuff about front-wheel drive. Having learned that lesson at DVCon, at SNUG you don’t pose it as a question that produces unexpected answers from the floor that forces the guy at the podium to acknowledge a lack of knowledge about “such things.”

At SNUG, you just tell the audience straight up that the first-ever on-board MCU lived under the hood of the ’77 Toronado. No keynoter in Silicon Valley wants to be reminded twice that they know less than their audience about what’s going under the hood of a muscle car.

[By the way, the audience at DVCon was wrong: It was the ’66 Toronado, not the ’77, that shipped with the first front-wheel drive in the modern era.]

* From March 3rd to April 19th is 46 days. So on March 3rd, when you ask a tech-savvy audience at DVCon what’s going to happen in 46 days, they better answer: The 50th anniversary of Gordon Moore’s earth-shattering pronouncement that every 12 months some metric associated with integrated circuits will do something stupendous — grow denser, smaller, cheaper, faster, smarter.

But when you pose the same rhetorical query to an equally tech-savvy audience on March 23rd at SNUG, you better ask what’s going to happen in 27 days. The MarCom team at Synopsys was on top of that particular tweak.

* Today, we’re producing chips with multiple billions of transistors on-board and they’re generally turning out a-okay. That’s all thanks to Synopsys’ better-than-6-sigma First Time Results. Oh yeah, and synthesis by Synopsys continues to improve, improve, and improve some more.

* At SNUG, you brag that IC Compiler II is now a year old and used by customers as diverse as LSI, Panasonic, ST, Imagination and Toshiba. At DVCon, you don’t want to sound like a marketeer, so you check your bragging rights at the door. And you don’t talk up your well-integrated, all-inclusive suite of tools at DVCon. Too many competitors [read “point-tool vendors”] are in the audience, folks who aren’t fans of that World Domination thing.

* At SNUG, you brag that Synopsys is leading the world’s advancements in analog design. You also brag on last year’s agreement guaranteeing early access to the most advanced ARM cores. Again at DVCon, it’s best to check those bragging rights at the door.

* At the first SNUG in 1991, there were 100 attendees. Here in 2015, if you total the attendance at SNUG over an entire year across the entire planet, the attendance is closer to 10,000. That 100-fold increase in attendance reflects the astonishing factoid that some chips today have 10 billion transistors. Most of that progress is due to Synopsys and their loyal customers, you tell your audience at SNUG. At DVCon, best to keep that particular light under your bushel as well.

* IP reuse is the key to happiness. Did we mention that Synopsys sells IP? Why strive, why struggle, when Synopsys has got the cure for what ails you? Put your efforts into what differentiates your product, not what doesn’t. Synopsys’ portfolio includes quality PCIe, USB, LPDDR, dot, dot dot: “Mix up our IP with your IP to leverage your innovation!”

* At DVCon you conclude your talk with a Hallmark-card nod to your audience of gifted engineers. You say: “Thank you for helping to drive the future forward!”

At SNUG, however, you re-consider that enigmatic Hallmark thing because it is indeed baffling, and you conclude your talk instead in a far simpler, far more accessible way. You just say: “Thank you!”

******************Jokes shared at DVCon & SNUG …

* A man with two watches never knows what time it is.

* When Aart de Geus finally gets his augmented brain implanted, his wife will order him out for a haircut and a software update. Only then will he remember to take out the trash, a hotly debated chore in the de Geus household. This one produced more laughs at SNUG than DVCon, but then Dr. de Geus didn’t get a standing ovation at DVCon. That speaker’s honorarium was saved for SNUG.

******************Channeling Kipling at SNUG …

If you can model, you can simulate.
If you can simulate, you can analyze.
If you can analyze, you can optimize.
If you can optimize, you can synthesize.
And if you can synthesize, you’ll be a man, my son.

******************In defense of satire …

Hey, I spent two hours sitting in folding chairs, plus a helluva lot of time commuting in heavy traffic, just to hear the identical keynote twice. Having a little fun at the expense of the MarCom committee that designed this visually-stimulating talk surely makes up for some of the annoyance. And for that I say, thank you for helping to drive my future forward.

Thanks to a lot of hard work and perseverance on the part of various thought leaders in the IP industry – folks like Mike McNamara, Warren Savage, McKenzie Mortensen, Clark Chen, Devin Persaud, Tiffany Sparks, Yervant Zorian, and Farzad Zarrinfar – at last, IP has become an anchor tenant at DAC.

A situation that’s been far too long in coming, given that these days there are approximately 30 companies in the EDA industry, but upwards of 500 in IP. The fact is, if DAC didn’t make itself available to showcase an industry with 10x more possible exhibitors than EDA, where’s the future of the conference anyway?

I had a chance to speak with ‘Mac’ McNamara on Tuesday of this week about the IP Initiative he’s heading up for DAC 2014. [The others on the list above are on the committee.] Mac’s a legend in the EDA community based on his expertise and leadership roles at Chronologic, SureFire, Verisity and Cadence, where he headed up the company’s C-to-Silicon Compiler and Virtual Systems Platform. Mac left Cadence in 2012, and has served since then as CEO of Adapt IP, an IP startup that boasts both John Sanguinetti and Lucio Lanza on its board.

During our conversation, Mac said that anyone planning on attending the Design Automation Conference this June in San Francisco will want to be there on Monday, June 2nd. That is, anyone who’s interested in the IP industry.

Per Mac, “DAC has been the place for IP for many years although not recognized as such. Instead IP has just been seen as a footnote at DAC for these past many years. There have been previous initiatives to change that, but this time we’re serious about it, really serious about making IP a focus of the conference.

“[Our goal] is to better serve our target customers by bringing them the information they need to make decisions about IP, along with other folks in the industry. Through sessions and tracks, we hope to really deliver on the promise that DAC is a great place for IP.

“Previously, conferences like Mobile World Congress [have showcased] IP for cell phones, but there’s never been one place where top-level IP, the verification of IP, the assemblage of IP, and considerations of the embedded guys have all [been covered] in one show.”

I asked Mac how he came to be spearheading all of this.

He said, “I have been on the DAC EC [Executive Committee] as Education Tutorial Chair for the past couple of years, so I was positioned to be involved with the IP initiative.

“Also, I have been in the chip design industry for a long time. As a computer architect in the last century building super computers, I realized there could be better tools, so I got involved at Chronologic, a startup with John Sanguinetti; then founded SureFire Verification that became a part of Verisity, and then was merged into Cadence with the Verisity acquisition where I led a group that built tools including C-to-Silicon. Now I’ve actually gone back to my beginnings as a designer at Adapt IP; we build standards compliant IP which can be adapted to the needs of each company.”

Mac acknowledged that the IP ecosystem is a complex one today: “An SoC today is an assemblage of purchased pieces of IP [from a variety of suppliers], plus internally developed IP which differentiate the product. Selling IP has gone from a few providing proprietary IP, to a rich ecosystem of IP suppliers and management companies who provide tools, services and IPs and IP subsystems that can be connected into the SoC.

“The thing about assembling IP, however, is that you have to make everything fit. You need to coerce hundreds of pieces of IP to talk to each other. It’s never cookie cutter, so at Adapt IP we realized that IP that can be adapted to your needs gets the best performance, power and area.”

Linking that to his leadership role at this year’s DAC, Mac said, “We are not one of the huge IP companies. If I was from, say, ARM or Imagination, it might be hard to separate my company’s brand from the focus of the DAC IP Initiative at the show. By being from a small IP company, it’s a more open field for me. I’m not biased towards any one of the big suppliers, so the day’s program will focus on everyone in IP.”

I noted that these days, the IP industry is dominated by a small handful of big players, so “where at DAC would I be able to discuss taking on ARM, Imagination, or other entrenched IP vendors?”

Mac said, “That’s a great question. Clearly we do better as an industry when there is competition [driving] higher levels of innovation, which is why we have developed six different sessions at DAC, [some related to the technology and some to the business of IP].

“There will be two parallel tracks, six sessions in total, all taking place on Monday, right off of the exhibit hall, and covering a broad set of topics.

“First session, the never-ending need for IP quality: How do you know if it’s any good? There will be three papers in that area. The second session will provide a space to look at the business issues.

“[Consider that recently] MIPS, Tensilica and Virage were bought by Imagination, Cadence and Synopsys, respectively, so along with ARM, the big companies all have processor offerings. There are quite a few little IP companies starting up as well. Those companies also need a place to show their wares, to present their IP. Maybe your little processor here is better than [other offerings in the market].

“At DAC, that conversation will be possible. We see the IP Initiative as a forum for the small companies and their ecosystem. And, there will be a panel where these folks can talk about raising money and getting companies.

“Part of the conversation at DAC, however, will also be about what the large IP companies want. What are they looking for, and how are they putting together subsystem IP? For instance, having a memory controller, a graphics processor, and CPU all interconnected by a bus. ARM tried to grow into that space 10 years ago, but it didn’t stick. Now we are all trying to deliver better value in this area.

“A third session will be about the simulation of IP; with purchased IP that’s hard as you can’t see the [internal] details.

“A fourth session will be about Hot IP and will include a set of IP folks presenting. I see this session as growing into something like the Hot Chips Conference. I would love to have people waiting for DAC to introduce their next IP. It may have already been announced 6 months earlier, but the information will be new to others hearing about it for the first time at DAC – the notion that DAC provides a shining spotlight on a product release.

“A fifth session will be about low power, and a sixth session will be about new techniques for generating IP.”

Beyond this content, Mac was also clearly excited about the lynchpin of the Monday schedule for IP at DAC: “The day will kick off with a keynote from the CEO of Imagination Technologies, Sir Houssein Yassaie. An excellent way to start the day!”

I asked the age-old question: What about the hybrid business model of service and product that companies perpetually struggle with in the IP industry?

Mac said, “It’s one of the central irritants in the IP business. Customers want to buy turnkey stuff, but they need help making it work. Warren is putting together the content at DAC that will address these issues.”

Mac addressed another age-old theme: “DAC has always been an alliance between exhibitors, providers, tools, academics and users – all playful animals who enjoy a bit of competition now a then, a little bit of old-fashioned fun. This year, to encourage attendees to visit the booths of IP exhibitors at the show, DAC will provide an SoC game card to every DAC attendee.

“Every DAC exhibitor is getting a questionnaire: What IP do they produce, including VIP or IP-assembly tools? We will gather the data from all the exhibitors, and make a game card; then issue to each IP company exhibitng a stamp – processor, memory controller, graphics, radio, etc. Designers will go to the booths of the IP companies looking to complete their SoC, for the stamps, and the exhibitors as they stamp the card, can then help those people understand what they are providing.

“The attendees will turn in their game card at a special booth, get a t-shirt, and be entered in a drawing for the usual iPad and PlayStation. It will be fun for the designers, and will help the exhibitors sponsoring the game to generate a list of [potential customers].”

Mac looked back and then ahead: “Last year, people who didn’t attend DAC told me it didn’t meet their needs. We are changing that, so now companies will say: If I’m not at DAC, I will miss out on connecting with customers [and colleagues].

“This is my first year heading up the IP Initiative. I see this year’s effort as a beginning, a very exciting beginning, which is why I expect to be involved next year as well. We really are serious about making IP a central focus of DAC!”